Getting Baked

A great bakery in a surreal setting

ashoba Brook Bakery makes its breads so slowly that the process takes 24 hours from mix to shelf, using a sourdough starter created from wild local grapes. But the real secret is out back. Behind this onetime warehouse, whose street-side entrance looks like that of any typical bakery, is a footbridge and a wooden deck with tables and long benches where you can listen to the bubbling brook while chowing down on sandwiches with combinations such as cheddar and apple, curried chicken salad, and sweet pea guacamole with fresh mozzarella, or pastries and snacks. You can reach the back deck through a dusty parking lot and past a Dumpster, or there’s a door there from the bakery that even some of the regulars seem not to notice, though you'll often see in-the-know cyclists and hikers out there. Jacobson

Shhhh! The bakery's huge kitchen houses
a wholesale operation, which supplies Nashoba Brook breads to 130 area restaurants and stores.

Shhhh! Cofounders Stuart Witt and John Gates were high school classmates. Witt was a baker; Gates has a law degree.

Shhhh! Slow baking breaks down
complex carbohydrates into simple
sugars and protein into amino acids,
making bread easier to digest, and
creates enzymes that aid digestion.

Shhh who knew

The Concord grape is a hybrid of a native New England grape. It was developed in Concord by farmer Ephraim Wales Bull in 1849, winning him a prize from the Boston Horticultural Society. Twenty years later, a New Jersey dentist, Thomas Welch, used them to create the first non-fermented grape juice.